People think I am full of it when I say that my household income (largish household with kids) is a quarter million a year and we are basically living like we are middle class. Money just doesn’t go as far as it used to.
As a millennial, I never would have imagined working my way up to this point only to find I can’t even buy a house. Oh sure, I could make the bare minimum down payment and get stuck with a super high mortgage payment, but if I lose my job or become disabled or unable to work, we would have no way to pay for it.
Groceries, housing, and insurance costs have more than doubled for us since 2019.
Same. My wife and I are in the process of trying to buy a house over an hour from town, because it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to afford one, and it’s still more than what our landlord paid for the house we’re renting. Housing prices have tripled in the last 8 years here. They doubled in the last two years alone. The house we’re renting would cost a million dollars to buy today and our landlord has a $1000 per month mortgage on it since she bought it right before the housing explosion. It’s pretty wacky that you can become a millionaire just by having been alive and financially stable a few years earlier, while everyone else is destined to be poor for the rest of their lives, even if they’re making a quarter million dollars per year.
It’s a normal-ass 1960’s neighborhood that your parents would have paid normal-ass prices for. The job market here exploded over the last 20 years, so there’s just too many people and not enough land. I’m one of those people, so it’s not like I don’t contribute to the problem.
There are neither too many people nor not enough land, but too many houses from the 60s passed down with initial property tax values and too many NIMBYs preventing new construction of large apartment buildings.
There are tons of big skyrise apartment complexes and dozens more in the works. But they all get labeled “luxury apartments”, despite basically being tiny little rectangles with no windows except for a sliding glass door at the end, and they cost just as much as a house to rent. The more traditional apartments have mostly been converted to condos and they’re also very expensive. It’s just crazy expensive here, despite your choices! Lots of people commute for over an hour each way and then it’s still a half million dollars for a decent house. You have to live at least an hour and a half in the right direction to get something for less.
People live in worse apartments they can afford, so they buy a luxury apartment. Their apartment is now open to a person who could afford that apartment, but not the luxury apartment, so theirs gets filled. This repeats down the chain of quality/desirability/cost.
Every new apartment adds supply, thus adding negative price pressure.
While it’s not quite as much, I’m in what was once the cheapest town within 30 miles in any direction, and our housing prices have gone up 800% in the last 20 years, compared to the 1000% in the other city I mentioned.
Rental prices are up about 1000% since then too. My first apartment was $400/mo in the early 2000s. That same apartment is now $3500/mo, and it hasn’t even been renovated.
Is 1000% a reasonable increase to you over 20 years? If wages had gone up similarly, I might agree. It’s pretty clear to me that communities prioritize high earning tax bases over their existing citizenry in nearly every situation, and in doing so, purposefully or not, they impoverish those citizens and disempower them from the possibility of advocating for change, as now they have to work so much there’s never any time to go to city council meetings or engage in active governance.
The average Gen Z, nationwide, pays over 50% of their income to rent. Its unsustainable, as evidenced by the insane increase in people experiencing homelessness over the last 5 years. My state had a nearly 40% increase last year alone, and a majority of our unhoused people work full time jobs, and a larger majority have lived here their whole life, contrary to the perceived narrative of people “moving here to be homeless”, which is absurd.
You’re getting argumentative with me like I’m the one who invented Capitalism.
Is 1000% a reasonable increase to you over 20 years?
Depends in relation to the prices of everything else over that same 20 years time frame.
All I’m saying is that prices go up over time, if for no other reason than just inflation. But supply and demand has a big part of raising prices even higher, more quickly. To act surprised that properties in high demand areas are more expensive now than before just seems unrealistic/uninformed to me.
Now what the solution to this is I don’t know, I’m not an economist. A conversation can be had as to if the government should enact laws of price control for the sale of homes and attach that to some floating marker like the rate of inflation, etc. Or to pass laws to make sure minimum wages offered by any company to their employees can allow someone to afford the purchase of a home with unregulated sales pricing. But you got to vote people in office who would want to pass those kind of laws to get that.
Most houses in desirable parts of the US are that bad. The cheap housing is in places that people don’t want to live, be it for location, job opportunities or culture/local laws.
And it’s not just the expensive towns. It’s any town. My childhood home an hour away from a major city has exponentially gone up in price, just as the ones in the city have done.
And it’s not just the expensive towns. It’s any town.
I don’t want to defend corporations that use real estate to gain profits, but at the same time, it’s not just any town, and I know this for a fact, as I started out by buying a very low price but very nice house that required a very long commute to my workplace, for low pricing.
They’re definitely needs to be an adjustment in salaries to match everything that is purchasable today, but to say that every housing in the country, no matter where it’s located, is not affordable is just not true.
$250,000 a year is middle class and has been for a long time - it’s about how much a doctor (who isn’t in a particularly high-paying specialty) makes. But DINKs with that household income could afford a million-dollar house.
They’re saying that someone that makes $250,000 today lives the lifestyle that would have been considered middle class 20 years ago, not that that salary is at all a median
They absolutely do not live remotely like middle class people from 2003. I graduated high school in 02 and my parents were mailmen. The difference in living standard is not even close.
I wasn’t saying that I thought that, I didn’t give my take at all, I was trying to be helpful in explaining what the other commenter meant. But since you’re calling me crazy…
To give my take on it, you’re right, there’s all sorts of ways that the lifestyles aren’t at all comparable, many things haven’t had the insane inflation that real estate has, so a person making 250k can obviously take a lot more vacations, go out to dinner more, buy more tech, etc than a middle class person from a few decades ago. But when it comes to buying homes, it gets a lot more comparable. Homes where I grew up have increased 4-5x in price over the last 25 years, so a family with a household income of 60k-ish (which is solidly middle class) buying a house that’s 3x their annual income would have been pretty typical in the early 2000’s. Now, if those same houses are being bought by households making 250k, it would be basically the same ratio of 3-4x their income.
So in home purchasing power (and that area only) low 6 figures is absolutely middle class, and anyone making under 6 figures has the home purchasing power of what used to be lower class
My personal definition of “upper class” excludes anyone who actually has to work. Wikipedia seems to agree, putting “CEOs and successful business owners” in the upper middle class. And the New York Times considers the 90th to 99th percentile of earners upper-middle-class.
I do see some places defining “upper class” as those earning at least twice the median household income (so about $150,000) but I don’t think that matches common usage. Is a software developer right out of college upper class? Or a nurse practitioner? I would say “clearly no, unless they happen to be from a very wealthy family”.
I really don’t think that’s a good metric given that the average house cost in San Francisco is 1.12 million dollars. Someone making $250,000 a year isn’t affording that house any more than someone making $54,000. They’re both priced out. That’s the point everyone else is making. That and the new idea what anyone working for a living is not upper class.
Do people think that having 4 criminal cases pending against you is meaningless? Like… This is accurate and prosecutions are moving forward. The fuck do you want? That’s how it works.
I assume it’s just the pace, but overall there’s plenty of reasons to be frustrated.
There’s already talk about how some of these cases might not be resolved until after the election, at which point, depending on how it goes, could be extremely problematic.
It feels frustrating because it’s mid-2023, and we may “run out of time” by end of 2024. People ask what the fuck was happening for 2.5 years? The reality of course is justice is not always, nor necessarily should be swift, and getting these investigations even started takes time to say nothing of collecting evidence and putting together a case. But also, 20 years ago even a single criminal indictment probably would have spelled the end of a Presidential campaign, and instead, Trump is successfully fundraising off of these charges and leading the polls.
He stole from charities and comitted a plethora of other crimes, if the DOJ was doing their job, he should never have been in a position to campaign for president in the first place.
Hey! I am an HVAC+R tech, commercial/residential scope. I can honestly tell you nobody’s HVAC will fail during regular hours. Most furnaces fail on the first -18°C night, and A/C always fail on the hotest days of the year (even if it was “fixed” last cooling season). And one certainty I have found in this industry, if the weather is insane (storms, +30° heatwave, -40° cold snap) I’ll be outside on a rooftop, fully exposed to the elements, fixing something that should have been addressed months ago. Regular maintenance & repairs can avoid 80% of failures, but industry needs to step up their quality of manufacture for equipment. Residential systems need to be built to spec, code, & SMACNA/ASHRAE standards. Not built to budget, and please dear god we need “builder spec” to get up to speed with modern equipment & standards! Rule of thumb is going the way of the Dodo bird.
it’s been decades since I last read it. Yep, that´s why I -after looking at it for a second- took it for another untypical superhero comic, that I also read decades ago and that looks a little similar :)
I’m not sure why you guys have such a hard time figuring out that a stirrer for coffee should have a little extra surface area to move the coffee around.
I know what people used it for but it doesn’t negate the fact that it’s design just so happened to be useful for that, not that it was designed that way on purpose.
People used anything they can get their mitts on as coke spoons this isn’t unique to McDonald’s but it HAS happened a fee times to several of thier disposable wares.
All I’ve ever seen are those little tiny straws they call swizzle sticks. I would use them like straws when I was a kid. Super small, super hard to suck through straws.
IDK why your comment reminded me, but back when I was in middle school (late 90s) we had an anti drug guest speaker. One of those ones where they were former addicts trying to scare you out of trying drugs. During the Q&A, someone asked him a question and that got him onto how plastic water bottles were super bad for you and you should never drink out of plastic because you’re ingesting tiny plastic particles. I remember we were laughing at him while administration was trying to shoo him off the stage.
Now we just kinda shrug when told we’re ingesting a credit card worth of plastic every week, lol.
To be fair, if you ever wanna reconsider your job, ask a server how much they make. In a city with $3,600 rent, it’s not uncommon for them to average $40-60/hr. Shit, I’m ugly as fuck and live in a cheap city but usually made around $1,000/week working part time in college a few years ago.
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